The New Old Me Read online

  ALSO BY MEREDITH MARAN

  Why We Write About Ourselves

  Why We Write

  A Theory of Small Earthquakes

  My Lie

  50 Ways to Support Lesbian and Gay Equality

  Dirty

  Enough About You

  Class Dismissed

  Notes from an Incomplete Revolution

  Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip

  What It’s Like to Live Now

  How Would You Feel If Your Dad Was Gay?

  Chamisa Road

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Meredith Maran

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Ebook ISBN 9780399574146

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  In memory of Sidney Melvin Maran

  July 18, 1927–April 4, 2013

  CONTENTS

  Also by Meredith Maran

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Disclaimer

  PART ONE | EMPTY PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO | HALF-EMPTY CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART THREE | HALF-FULL CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

  —MARILYN MONROE

  The New Old Me begins with my move to Los Angeles and focuses on the three years that followed, not on what happened before. To protect other people’s privacy and the integrity of the storytelling, I’ve compressed time frames, refrained from writing about my children, and altered identifying details and names.

  PART ONE

  EMPTY

  PROLOGUE

  AUGUST 30, 2012

  When the knife slips, I feel nothing. Everything freezes: the knife, my breath, time. I go numb. Dumb.

  I know that I’ve cut my finger, and I know that it’s bad. But it’s too soon for pain. I hold the ring finger of my right hand to my face and I see things I shouldn’t: blood, tendon. Is that bone?

  I grab a dish towel with my good hand and wrap it around my bleeding hand and thrust the mess into the air.

  Instinctively I call out my wife’s name. For fifteen years, that’s what I did whenever something terrible or wonderful happened. I called out my wife’s name. My wife is four hundred miles away, but old habits die hard. Nearest emergency room, I tell myself. Hurry.

  I don’t know where the nearest hospital is, or how to get there. This is Los Angeles, not Manhattan, my childhood hometown of the geometric grid; not Oakland, where I lived for the past thirty years, with its numbered east-west avenues. I don’t know where anything is, nor how to get there in L.A.’s twisted gridlock of four-lane streets and scrimmaging intersections.

  The nearest hospital, Siri tells me, is fifteen minutes away. “Everything in L.A. is fifteen minutes away,” the locals say, “and it takes an hour to get there.” The dish towel on my finger is soaked with blood already. I hope this time the locals are wrong.

  I replace the towel with a fresh one, grab my purse and my keys, maneuver my upraised arm and then the rest of me into the driver’s seat of my car. I don’t want to be in the driver’s seat of my car. I want to be in the passenger seat of my wife’s car.

  I drive south on Silver Lake Boulevard, straight into the setting sun. At the intersection of Silver Lake and Sunset, Siri tells me to turn north. If I knew where north was, I wouldn’t be talking to Siri. It’s easier to turn left than right without the use of my right hand. I decide that “north” is “left.”

  I pass the sprawling Scientology campus on Sunset and pull into the ER’s circular drive. A sign on the wall reads DROP-OFFS ONLY. NO PARKING.

  L.A. hiking trails have valets. Real estate open houses. Ice-cream parlors. Boutiques. But not the ER, where a valet is actually needed. Not here, where the not-rich people go.

  I decide against arguing with the security guard that I’m both driver and patient, and therefore entitled to leave my car here while I drop myself off. I drive to the nearest garage, spin up and up and up the circular ramp, find a space on the fourth floor. I’m too dizzy to search for the elevator. I get dizzier, trudging down the urine-soaked stairwell, right hand held high.

  The ER doors slide open. I follow the receptionist’s eyes to my right hand. Apparently the newspaper rule “If it bleeds, it leads” also applies here. She jumps up, rushes me into a treatment room, and runs out. A tall, balding doctor appears, snapping on gloves, and then a nurse, her hands already gloved. Neither of them makes eye contact with me. Neither of them says a word. The nurse lowers my hand from above my head, removes the dish towel, and deposits it in the hazardous waste bin. She lines the doctor’s lap with blue-and-white Chux and sets my right hand into his upturned palm. His hand and the Chux turn red.

  The doctor squints at my wedding ring. “We’ll need to cut that off,” he says.

  “You can’t do that,” I say.

  The doctor raises his eyebrows at me. I’m sure he sees plenty of crazies in this ER; how would he know I’m not one of them? Maybe I should tell him about the Dr. Phil moment I had yesterday, when I actually thought, It’s time to move on with my life, and I looked at my wedding ring, wondering what it would feel like to take it off for the first time in a decade, to be me without it, without the story it used to tell, and then closed my eyes and pulled it off.

  I put the ring in my underwear drawer and closed the drawer. I looked at my left hand without my ring on it and put the ring back on. I unhooked the gold chain around my neck and hung the ring on the chain and looked at my left hand without my ring on it and took the ring off the chain and put it back on my finger.

  Problem identified. What I want is not to move on with my life. What I want is my old life back.

  How long, I wondered, will it take me to stop wanting that? Will I be seventy, eighty, ninety, single and still wearing this wedding ring?

  Baby steps, I told myself, and put the ring on my right hand instead of my left. It felt weird—scary, sad—but also accurate: not exactly married, not exactly not.

  “I can’t let you cut tha
t ring off,” I tell the doctor.

  He frowns. The nurse whisks the bloody Chux off his lap and replaces them with a clean set.

  “I’m sure you cut wedding rings off all the time,” I say. “But my wife and I are separated. I’m still hoping—”

  The doctor stares at me. There is a certain narrowing of his eyes, a certain clenching of his jaw. I realize that although it’s 2012 and gay marriage is legal in seven states and we’re in one of the world’s gayest cities, this white-haired, white-faced man is not happy to be holding the hand of a woman who has a wife.

  I watch as his conscience kicks in, or the diversity training the hospital made him take, or the nondiscrimination policies they require him to uphold. He reassembles his face. Too late. Message received.

  I’ve been gay in America long enough to know Rule One: Physical Safety Above All. I don’t want this guy to get sloppy on the job because he’s sewing up a smartass, half-married, geriatric lesbian who doesn’t even know which hand a wedding ring belongs on.

  I don’t want to share any more of my innards with this doctor than the parts of me he’s already holding. I won’t tell him that until I got into my car and drove to Los Angeles three months ago, I thought I knew how the final phase of my life would go, and it didn’t involve Los Angeles, let alone a solo trip to the Sunset Boulevard ER. I thought the choices I’d made had set me up for a sweet ride the rest of the way.

  Despite my boomer-appropriate countercultural predilections, I’d turned out to be a fair to middling grown-up. I’d surrounded myself with smart, loving people; saved money when I could and spent it frugally when I couldn’t; worked hard at a career I loved and was good at; renovated a three-story Victorian on the Oakland/Berkeley border and lived there, while its value tripled, for twenty-three years.

  Most auspiciously, I was ecstatically married. And I was sure I always would be.

  “Let me try to get it off myself,” I tell the doctor.

  He holds up my bleeding hand in the narrow space between our faces. “You’ve cut yourself to the bone. If infection sets in, you could lose your finger. You could even go septic. Do you know what that means?”

  “Please,” I say. “Let me try.”

  “I’ll give you fifteen minutes. Nurse Santos will help you.” The doctor beckons to the nurse and they both leave the room.

  Nurse Santos returns with an armful of supplies. She sets a plastic bucket of ice, a giant tube of K-Y Jelly, and a pile of Chux on the tray in front of me. She plunges my finger into the bucket of ice, waits a few beats, pulls my finger out, slathers it with K-Y Jelly, and hands it back to me.

  I close my eyes and I pull and twist and pull and twist. The ring is stuck. It’s a vise grip tightening on my finger. It hurts like hell.

  The doctor reappears. “It’s time,” he says. “So. Which would you rather keep? Your finger or your wedding ring?”

  As he speaks, Nurse Santos gathers up what remains of our efforts and assembles a workstation on the rolling table: a neat row of syringes, scissors, thread, and some unrecognizable scary-looking instruments sealed in blue plastic bags.

  The doctor reaches for my hand. I grab it back.

  “Any jeweler will be able to fix that ring,” the nurse says.

  The doctor rolls his shiny metal stool closer to me and grabs my right hand and shoves something cold and hard between my ring finger and my ring. I feel a sharp click. The nurse takes my hand before I can look at it. She sets a small plastic specimen jar next to me. The doctor’s face floats near mine. He positions a syringe over my hand.

  “This will numb you,” he says. “Then we’ll sew you up.”

  I turn away so I can’t see what he’s about to do. Instead my eyes turn to the specimen jar. In it, the broken circle of my wedding ring.

  ONE

  MAY 20, 2012

  I stand in the living room of the house I’ve lived in for the past twenty-three years, trying to imagine what I’ll need for the life that comes next.

  I raised two sons in this house, wrote nine books, threw dozens of parties, earned and spent and lost money, celebrated birthdays from thirty-eight to sixty. For the last fifteen years I lived here with the love of my life.

  What to take? Clothes. No matter where I end up living or what I end up doing, I’ll need clothes. I climb the stairs to the attic, start grabbing armloads of hangers, trudging up- and downstairs until my car is full.

  I move through the other rooms quickly, numbly, grabbing small things as I go. Curl gel. Milk frother. Zoloft, Ambien, Ativan. Potato scrubber. Framed photographs of my kids, my friend Patricia, my wife and me.

  Many times in the past three years, I’ve tried on the idea of leaving. Each time I recoiled from the thought. Now that I’m doing it, I’m not one inch closer to wanting to go. I’m standing beside my packed car, nailed to the moment. There must be a way to save this marriage, I think for maybe the five millionth time.

  “Meredith?” My seventy-seven-year-old neighbor, Vonna, is taking her daily constitutional from her end of the block to ours. She peers into my car.

  “You ladies going on vacation?” she asks.

  “Just me,” I answer. For better and for worse, I’ve always told pretty much everyone pretty much everything. Now only my wife, my family, and my closest friends know that I’m moving to L.A. I barely believe it myself.

  I hug Vonna good-bye.

  “Hurry back, you hear?” she says.

  Not gonna happen, I think. “Will do,” I say, and I get in my car and go.

  —

  DRIVING SOUTH through the barren moonscape that flanks Interstate 5, I flip through stations on my car radio, attempting to muffle my thoughts. Spanish-language stations, Jesus stations, bubblegum-pop stations, static. The narrative in my head, though, is perfectly clear.

  “My marriage is over.” I say it out loud.

  “Why?” is the question. The answer is “I don’t know.”

  My wife and I were the happiest couple anyone, including us, had ever known. I attributed most of our glory to her. In past relationships I was a lover and a fighter. My wife was the keeper of our peace; she valued harmony above all things. She lived in a meadow, we always said; I lived in a cave. Why would I lure her into my darkness when she beckoned me toward wildflowers and light?

  Conflict between us was rare. When it happened, she simply stopped talking to me for an hour or a day. Then she’d crawl into bed beside me. “Let’s make up,” she’d purr. Gratefully I’d take her into my arms.

  As the years went by, we bragged about it: Two fights in five years. Three fights in ten.

  The harmony felt so good, I never considered its consequences. I went on believing the story of us, the one we told and retold. I was perfect for her and she was perfect for me and we were perfectly happy in our perfect, friction-free marriage. Turns out things that needed to be said were not said. Turns out the price of harmony-at-all-costs was high.

  Overnight, our beauty went ugly. No fighting one day; nothing but fighting the next. We tried marriage counseling. Individual therapy. Trial separations. There were tearful, transitory reconciliations, wrenching angry letters left where love notes used to be—packed into each other’s suitcases, slipped into the books we were reading, into each other’s lingerie drawers. For three years we wrestled, trying to find our way back to each other, ourselves, the once-magical us. Nothing worked.

  My self-confidence, never my strong suit, was flagging. My career was circling the drain. Interspersed with brief intervals of employment, I’d managed to eke out a living as a freelance writer for forty-five years. But then 9/11 and the 2008 crash happened, and the magazine and book publishing businesses tanked, turning my income into a shadow of its former self. Despite my penchant for taking things personally, I knew that the problem wasn’t mine alone. Writer friends were taking teaching jobs, if they could get th
em, moving to cheaper cities, marrying for health insurance and rent. None of those stopgaps was an option for me.

  Throughout 2011 and 2012, the cascade of catastrophes continued. On the first day of our third trial separation, I got an e-mail from my socially responsible investment advisor, copying my wife, informing us that she’d made an accounting error. The $80,000 she’d reported as the balance in my account actually belonged in my wife’s. My balance was an even zero. Days of frantic forensic accounting failed to make my savings reappear.

  So when a miracle appeared in my inbox in the form of a copywriting job offer in Los Angeles, I didn’t hesitate. A job four hundred miles away wouldn’t replace my savings or restore the joy I’d had and lost with my wife. But I needed money, and my wife and I needed a break. In a rare moment of unanimity, she and I agreed that I should take the job. I was sorrow-struck, not crazy. I walked through that one open door.

  I canceled my therapy appointments and my hiking dates and had my mail forwarded to my new office and arranged to crash with a Bay Area expat friend and her new Angeleno man and said good-bye to my friends and family.

  The farewell I’d dreaded most had been averted in the saddest possible way. Last night I’d gone to bed believing that something would happen between us before I left this morning. My wife would creep into the guest-room bed with me during the night, or bring me tea in the morning, or call to me from our marriage bed.

  But no. I’d awakened early this morning to walls that rang with emptiness. When I went downstairs to check the driveway, I’d found that her car was gone.

  —

  DRIVING, DRIVING. My phone rings. My wife, I think.

  “Where are you?” asks my best friend, Celia. It was Celia’s house I ran to, the first time the fighting got bad enough for me to leave. The reason for my arrival on her doorstep was almost as hard on Celia as it was on me. She used to call my wife and me “Mom and Mom” because being with us, she said, made her feel like a happy, secure child.